Australia Faces Wave Of 'Climate Refugees' From Small Island Nations

Australia’s main coalition of refugee advocacy groups has urged the government to prepare for an impending wave of people fleeing neighboring small island nations in the Pacific Ocean due to climate change-driven sea level rise.

Phil Glendenning, the head of the Refugee Council of Australia, recently said that the government should expand its definition of refugees to include people affected by climate change and offer the same protections it provides to those fleeing conflict or political oppression.

"These are people who are not suffering from persecution because of their beliefs, race or because they belong to a particular group. So they don't meet the Refugee Convention criteria but, nevertheless, there will be a need for people to be resettled, because they have been displaced by climate change," Glendenning said, according to the Guardian.

"This is a new cohort of people who are emerging; the rest of the world needs to pay attention," he added.

The government of Kiribati is seeking to relocate the island’s population of about 100,000 people and has requested that Australia and New Zealand accept them as refugees, but neither Canberra nor Wellington have made any offers.

Nevertheless, Australia’s Foreign Ministry has acknowledged that scientific evidence indicates that Kiribati will become uninhabitable in less than two decades if sea levels continue to rise.

“Kiribati is at the front line of climate change," Foreign Minister Bob Carr said in February. "Unless action is taken, Kiribati will be uninhabitable by 2030 as a result of coastal erosion, sea level rise and saltwater intrusion into drinking water."

Similar increases have been documented around other small island nations in the South Pacific with slight variations due to “atmospheric, oceanographic and geological processes,” according to the report.

The vast body of scientific research on climate change indicates that rising sea levels are attributable to the heat expansion of ocean waters and the melting of glaciers and polar ice caps as average global temperatures rise due to the buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere generated by human activity, such as the mass consumption of fossil fuels and deforestation.